8 Bad Books Written by Great Authors
Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
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He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.
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Finding authors who've gone their whole careers without publishing anything questionable quality-wise is probably going to lead to noting a bunch of creative minds who've prioritized quality over quantity to a dramatic extent. Like, nothing by J.D. Salinger is noted for being bad, but there’s also not that much by Salinger in the first place. Same goes for, uh, Homer? Like, the guy who probably wrote The Odyssey and The Iliad, but also did that so far back in time that people don’t know for certain whether he existed or not.
So, the main thing is that the following authors are all pretty great. They had at least one misfire, though, and those misfires are acknowledged below. If you really like one of the authors mentioned, maybe you'll still get something out of their more disappointing material, so don’t write these off entirely. Also, a couple of these examples are, admittedly, hot takes, so that might be an extra reason not to write all of them off entirely.
8 'The Regulators' (1996)
Since Stephen King wrote The Regulators under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, he’s going to be here twice, first as Bachman, and later as King. If you think that’s nothing but a sneaky way to just talk about King too much, then too bad. By the standards of either King or “Bachman,” The Regulators is quite bad. That’s the main thing.
The Regulators is a poor excuse for a sci-fi/horror novel, and you're better off just reading its mirror novel, Desperation.
Maybe it starts off somewhat intriguingly, with a bunch of people being murdered, and there being some mystery as to who – or what – might be behind such killings, yet things entirely fall apart before too long. The Regulators is a poor excuse for a sci-fi/horror novel, and you're better off just reading its mirror novel, Desperation, which was released the same day and “credited” to Stephen King… and even that one’s pretty flawed, but at least it stays interesting for a longer amount of time than The Regulators.
7 'The Festival of Insignificance' (2014)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the best-known novel by Milan Kundera, and it’s good enough to make him pretty much a great author by default. He’s had his other acclaimed books for sure, but by 2014, he was in his mid-80s, and what ended up being his final novel, The Festival of Insignificance, did feel pretty tired. Not even in a good way, and definitely not in a “he’s old but wise” fashion.
This is the sort of thing that would've never been published if not for the fact that Kundera was a very well-established author by this point. You can point at some of his earlier books and say, “Yep, those are why he became celebrated,” but The Festival of Insignificance is aggressively undercooked. It’s barely even a novel, yet if judged as a novella, it’s also entirely disappointing. It is absolutely insignificant, and sure, maybe that’s the point, or the joke. But it’s definitely not The Joke (1967) in terms of quality.
6 'The Legacy of Heorot' (1987)
Well, you’ve got three authors here, but The Legacy of Heorot is mainly being highlighted for the involvement of two out of three of said authors: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. They collaborated often on science fiction (usually of the hard variety) novels, and some are pretty darn good, but not so much this one. This one’s a bit of a mess, to the extent that even trying to summarize what goes down here narratively feels more or less pointless.
Aliens, blah blah blah, people, blah blah, planet, blah, whatever. It’s not a book that feels particularly well-thought-out, to say the least, and it’s also hard to sense much passion behind it. The Legacy of Heorot is probably a novel you haven’t heard of, even if you might've heard of Ringworld (which Niven wrote without Pournelle) or Lucifer’s Hammer, and with good reason. It is utterly forgettable, at best.
5 'Ratner's Star' (1976)
Another sci-fi book, and sure, the idea of an author like Don DeLillo tackling such a genre is interesting by default, since most of his stuff is more grounded (usually dramatic, and sometimes darkly funny/satirical), but wow does he not do science fiction very well in Ratner’s Star. This is such a swing and a miss for the author, who’s usually in his element when he’s outside his comfort zone, to some extent (he’s penned some great thrillers, like Libra and the underrated Running Dog).
Ratner's Star is a mess, and not disjointed or wild in any sort of fun way, either. The plot here involves a very young mathematician studying a message probably sent from outer space, which is intriguing enough for a short while, but not a long while, and Ratner’s Star unfortunately goes on for a long while. It’s one of DeLillo’s longest novels, and certainly doesn’t deserve to be. It’s 400+ pages all up, and probably would've still felt overlong if it had been about half that length.
4 'Kafka on the Shore' (2002)
This is one of those previously alluded to hot takes, since Kafka on the Shore is something that’s pretty well regarded, but also, why? Well, it starts off decently enough, and you get intrigue and all that because there are two main threads slowly progressing forward at the same time, and the idea of them meeting at some point seems like it could be interesting.
Kafka on the Shore gets so bogged down, though, at a certain point, and there are some truly eye-rolling and repetitive discussions regarding philosophy and art that feel like Haruki Murakami telling rather than showing. It’s not really all that smart or profound, because the novel is pretty spoon-feedy in nature, and there are other stories out there written by Murakami that are quite a bit more worthy of your time.
3 'Bleeding Edge' (2013)
For a while, it felt like Bleeding Edge might well have been the final Thomas Pynchon novel, which would've been a real shame. It would've been a whimper ended on, a bit like Kundera and The Festival of Insignificance, so it’s good that 2025 came around and with it, the release of Shadow Ticket. That novel’s actually one of Pynchon’s more divisive ones, in all honesty, but at least it’s fun and has parts that scratch the same itch as some of the author’s best works.
With Bleeding Edge, on the other hand, you have something that feels out of touch. Pynchon always felt in control with his other books, even when they were going out of control, but his attempt at doing a story set in the 21st century feels utterly awkward, and it’s the only book of Pynchon’s where one can imagine him being unintentionally lost in what he’d written while he was writing it. Truth be told, it’s kind of sad to see, but at least it wasn’t actually the final note of his life’s work.
2 'The Five' (2011)
Speaking of novels written by people who felt like they were out of touch with what they were writing, here’s The Five, which is utterly dismal. At least Bleeding Edge was something of a noble failure for Pynchon, while Robert McCammon wrote something 100% miserable, annoying, and awkward to read. It’s a book about a rock band who don’t feel remotely like any actual band who’s ever existed, and they find their popularity increasing when they start being targeted by an assassin with hard-to-discern motivations.
People are incentivized to go to this band’s shows not despite the violence occurring around those shows, but because of the violence, and it’s beyond implausible. The Five keeps straining and getting sillier the longer it goes on for, and it goes on for a very long time. It’s an all-time bad novel, with the band’s lyrics (they do a lot of songwriting and singing) being some of the most cringe-inducing passages in a novel you will ever read. The Five is seemingly intended to be a love letter/tribute to the rock genre and live music generally, but it feels more like an unintentional takedown (or hate letter?) to those things instead, owing to its sheer incompetency.
1 'Lisey's Story' (2006)
Stephen King cites Lisey’s Story as one of his personal favorite books he’s written in his long and largely impressive career as a writer, yet it’s a fairly baffling pick for such a high honor. The story is an undeniably personal one, which is the only way the love King has for it makes any sort of sense, and even then, not a whole lot of sense. The book’s too long, too sappy, and too annoying with some of its stylistic and creative choices.
It’s a truly irritating and patience-testing novel, which is a potentially unkind thing to say, yes, but at the same time, something can mean a lot to the person who wrote it while also being borderline-unreadable to most other people out there (as in the people who didn’t write it). Lisey’s Story should’ve stayed unpublished, because King wrote it for himself, and unlike other (actually good) books of his that are clearly introspective and based on his personal experiences, it’s hard to actually get anything approaching satisfaction or enjoyment out of this utterly turgid novel. The best part of Lisey's Story is when it finally/mercifully smucking ends.
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